Ok. So, I basically took the āCult of Augustusā idea from John Dominic Crossanās āGod and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Nowā that I quoted in the very beginning of the thread, and also backed up from Robert Mowery which full book can be found here
bsw.org/Biblica/Vol-83-2002/Son-Of-God-In-Roman-Imperial-Titles-And-Matthew/229/
Thanks. Again I think that at this point, Crossan is not too far off here. But I would like to give you in turn a few quotes to read myself. First of all this is from N.T. (Tom) Wrightās
How God Became King: Getting to the Heart of the Gospels:
Ever since the eighteenth century it has been fashionable to come at the gospels by asking the historical question: Did it really happen? And the answer that the intellectual fashions of our sceptical age have demanded has been something like this. Yes, Jesus really existed, but all that material around the edge ā his miraculous birth, the saving meaning of his death, and above all his resurrection and Ascension ā never happened. Thatās what the later church added to express its own faith. But when we take that away, the bit in the middle that weāre left with ā the body without the cloak, if you like ā is a very different story from the one the church has told. Take away the beginning and the ending, the bits you find in the creeds, the bits that people refer to today when they talk about āpreaching the gospelā, and the Jesus youāve left with is one of three things. Either heās a revolutionary, hoping to overthrow the Romans by military violence and establish a new Jewish state. Or heās a wild-eyed apocalyptic visionary expecting the end of the world. Or heās a mild-mannered teacher of sweet reasonableness, of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of āmanā. Or perhaps heās some combination of the above. There are plenty of possibilities.
In the first two cases, of course, Jesus was deluded. He didnāt kill the Romans, but the Romans killed him. And if he was expecting the āend of the worldā, well, weāre still waiting. In the third case he was similarly deluded, because most people, including most of his followers from that day to this, have been anything but sweetly reasonable. Instead, they have busied themselves with inventing dogmas (like the virgin birth and the resurrection), writing creeds, establishing the church, and fighting everybody else and one another, desperate to push their interpretation to the front of the line.
Those ways of telling (or not telling) the story of Jesus have been common coin among sceptics for the past two hundred years or more. The āliberalā picture of Jesus, early Christianity and the gospels lives on in the persistent reductionism of a thousand books both scholarly and popular. For many, in fact, it is the new āorthodoxyā. Unless you say something along those lines, you are likely to be sneered at. You canāt be a serious thinker.
The strength of this position is that it really does try, to some extent at least, to pay attention to the bits of the churchās own canon that the churchās own creeds had bypassed. At its best, it produces, as we shall see, a strong āsocial gospelā agenda in which many of the things the gospels emphasize about Jesus ā his care for the poor, the sick, the weak and so on ā are given a new energy that official āorthodoxyā has often strangely failed to supply. Its weakness is that it neither has the will nor the means to integrate that central piece, the why-did-Jesus-live bit, with the outer, credal questions, the puzzles of Jesusā birth, death, resurrection, Ascension and second coming.
Many of us, I guess, have grown up with this liberal reductionism in the air. Books with titles like
Jesus Who Became Christ abound. The āJesus Seminarā, which trumpeted its own āfindingsā (āScholars say that . . .ā.) while almost all New Testament scholars in America gave it a wide berth, went down very well with
Time magazine and with liberal clergy who wanted to believe something like its reductionist teaching in the first place. The idea that Jesus came to teach a new, simple, clear ethic of being nice to people, without any ādogmaticā claims or āsupernaturalā elements, is so deeply embedded in Western culture that one sometimes despairs, like a gardener faced with ground ivy, of ever uprooting it. To this day there seems a ready market right across the Western world for books that say that Jesus was just a good Jewish boy who would have been horrified to see a āchurchā set up in his name, who didnāt think of himself as āGodā or even the āSon of Godā, and who had no intention of dying for anyoneās sins ā the church has got it all wrong. The authors of such books routinely proclaim themselves āneutralā, āunbiasedā, āimpartialā, or āindependentā. As if.
This reductionist picture suggests, in other words, that we try to picture the other way around. Instead of privileging the creeds and screening out the middle of the gospels, letās privilege the middle material of the gospels and screen out all that odd supernatural stuff at either end, the ideas that found their way into the creeds. This position remains hugely popular. As with Richard Dawkins and his ilk, people still clearly want, in fact they rather badly want, to be told that Jesus was just a great teacher, not the divine Saviour. The greatly outworn phrase āthe Jesus of history and the Christ of faith,ā which has meant many different things, naturally reflect this position.
There are of course infinite modifications within this picture. It has become commonplace to point out that these liberal portraits of Jesus have an uncomfortable habit of resembling the artists who are sketching them ā or at least, the artists as they would like to imagine themselves. By itself, however, that remark is just a cheap shot, however true. We need to dig deeper and see more of what was going on.
But thatās just my wishā¦
